Fridolf Johnson papers

The Fridolf Johnson Papers consist of ten linear feet of material related to Johnson’s career as a printer, calligrapher, and writer, spanning the dates 1950 to 1985, reflecting Johnson’s interest in lettering, italic handwriting, and the fine and graphic arts. It includes prolific correspondence, photographs, greeting cards, broadsides, prospectuses, printing ephemera, keepsakes, books, serials, clippings, articles, pamphlets, programs, exhibition announcements, catalogs, and bookplates.

The collection is organized in three series: Series I Subject Files, Series II Miscellaneous, and Series III Printed Ephemera. The first series, a compilation of subject files created by Johnson and arranged in alphabetical order, consists of information on particular people and topics. This series represents one of the collection’s strengths, as it contains a vast amount of material on prominent graphic artists, printers, and typographers with whom Johnson worked or corresponded. Included in his archive are the names Albert Schiller, Eric Gill, John Lehman, Rudolph Ruzicka, Paul Bennett, Warren Chappell, Frederick Goudy, and Joseph Weiler. Johnson also accumulated extensive material on private presses and their operators, such as Charles Antin of Serendipity Press, John Anderson of Pickering Press, and John Lehman of Katydid Press. These folders contain correspondence to and from Johnson offering business advice or aesthetic opinions, suggestions for projects, clippings and articles, photographs, broadsides, prospectuses, and print specimens.

While active in the printing community, Johnson preserved profuse records on the Typophiles, Junkateers, New York Chappel, and Zamorano Club. (These include three files of photographs documenting Junkateer field trips.) Johnson also amassed a wealth of information while researching his articles; he preserved this material in his archives, frequently along with copies of the essays he wrote. These topics range from the artists William Morris, Donald Jackson, Roy Lindstrom, and Rockwell Kent to the history of bookplates. (The William Morris file includes a holograph signature by Jane Morris.) This first series also contains material on artists Walter Kuhn and Frank DeGioia, wood engraver Paul Forster, and illustrator Tom Cleland. Many of these files include photographs of the artist’s work or, in the case of Forster, actual prints. Johnson maintained several folders related to calligraphy and calligraphic organizations as well. These consist of newsletters, exhibition announcements, requests for Johnson’s own work, examples of calligraphy, and material on Jim Hayes and Oscar Ogg.

The second series is Johnson’s miscellaneous compilation of printed material. These folders contain catalogs, exhibition announcements, invitations, keepsakes, serials, and some of Johnson’s personal correspondence. The last series is composed of three subsections devoted exclusively to printed ephemera. The first subseries is a large collection of private press ephemera such as keepsakes, print specimens, advertisements, and prospectuses which Johnson acquired throughout the years. The second subseries contains keepsakes from Oxford University Press and the third contains several issues of The Minotaur, a serial published in California in the 1960s.